I find piloting with joystick is in teresting, but I lack some awareness.

To do that, how about a marker of direction, so you know where is the target. For example, you fly near Earth, you type ENTER and MOON, but unles you type C, you don't know where it is.

Also, it would be useful to could drop a nav bouy, in case you want to go somewhere and then go back to an arbitrary point in space.

Other features include a display of dates when objects can be seen. it's annoying to be forced to edit SCC files to find those dates, and some SCC files don't have a remark containing the date. How do you read such a date when no rems are present?

I also might like to pilot. How about a space shuttle? how about practicing docking?

Also, an interesting feature could be implemented, so galaxy objects could be split in Nebulae, Galaxies, Quasars and anomalies, etc, so performance can be improved.

Also, disabling objects (using categories as described in last paragraph) at certain distance given the size (the important thing would be apparent size, could be nice. That way you improve performance and you don't have to move extras and addons.

If you need arts for explosions, I already made those for another gaming project.

...Good work!!

Celestia is NOT a game and certainly NOT a space combat game. If you want interactive spaceships, use Orbiter.

In the CVS version, (1.40), deepsky objects are split already into various categories. We are presently working intensively on an accurate "mass rendering" of galaxies, given catalog data. I have just finished a huge and most accurate catalog of >25000 galaxies from the best professional sources.

With this number of galaxies, we need to work further on culling, though...

Here are some more useful comments than Fridger's, who always gets hot under the collar the moment anyone even mentions thinking that Celestia is any kind of 'game'...

ar81 wrote:To do that, how about a marker of direction, so you know where is the target. For example, you fly near Earth, you type ENTER and MOON, but unles you type C, you don't know where it is.

This actually would be a bit handy sometimes. You mean like the little arrows that appear on the edges of the screen in some space games that tell you that the target body is off the edge of the screen in that direction?

Also, it would be useful to could drop a nav bouy, in case you want to go somewhere and then go back to an arbitrary point in space.

You can do this already using the Bookmarks menu - it won't drop a navbuoy, but it will remember your location. Unfortunately I think it only remember the location in space, not in time. What would be nice is if BMs could be made relative to planets and other bodies, so you'd have the option of going back to the same place relative to something interesting no matter when it was. I don't think you can do that yet though.

I also might like to pilot. How about a space shuttle? how about practicing docking?

On this point, Fridger is right. This isn't what Celestia is about - if you want something like that then you'll probably want to check out Orbiter instead.

Also, an interesting feature could be implemented, so galaxy objects could be split in Nebulae, Galaxies, Quasars and anomalies, etc, so performance can be improved.

This would be nice. I think that splitting Nebulae from Galaxies has been mentioned before, but nothing's come of it yet.

Yeah, well, they're not going to be in Celestia. Celestia is supposed to be an interactive educational space simulator, not a space combat game or a flight simulator. Orbiter might have some of those things, or you might just want to go check out a space MMORPG like EVE Online or another space combat game.

Evil Dr Ganymede wrote:You can do this already using the Bookmarks menu - it won't drop a navbuoy, but it will remember your location. Unfortunately I think it only remember the location in space, not in time. What would be nice is if BMs could be made relative to planets and other bodies, so you'd have the option of going back to the same place relative to something interesting no matter when it was. I don't think you can do that yet though.

Evil Doctor G,
I don't know if you've currently saved any bookmarks ?, but I can say that all mine have been saved in both location and time.

In fact, being able to save a bookmark in location only would be handy for when I'm feeling really lazy, and want to view my bookmark of 'the night sky from my home town', and not have to press the "!" key.

Evil Dr Ganymede wrote:Here are some more useful comments than Fridger's, who always gets hot under the collar the moment anyone even mentions thinking that Celestia is any kind of 'game'...

Aha, yet another analysis of my "adrenaline household" by a familiar "expert"

But I doubt whether your comments were more useful... (see below)

For good reasons, I preferred to comment only about 2-3 items in the list (I could expand anytime, why I chose not to comment on the others ).

EDG wrote:

I also might like to pilot. How about a space shuttle? how about practicing docking?

On this point, Fridger is right. This isn't what Celestia is about - if you want something like that then you'll probably want to check out Orbiter instead.

Unlike you, I am also right on my second point :

EDG wrote:

Also, an interesting feature could be implemented, so galaxy objects could be split in Nebulae, Galaxies, Quasars and anomalies, etc, so performance can be improved.

...I think that splitting Nebulae from Galaxies has been mentioned before, but nothing's come of it yet.

Incorrect...or uninformed (no adrenaline involved here )

In contrast to your "useful comment" above, the galaxy issue is being worked on intensively since weeks. This must have escaped to our /planetary/ scientist! There is a most active thread about our joint ongoing galaxy project with 4703 hits and 141 posts by quite a number of people! I have just finished coding some new HSV-coloration algorithm in galaxy.cpp, about which I am going to report very soon. The results are quite beautiful and realistic, indeed.

I didn't know it was intended solely for educational purposes.
I'll get Orbiter, yeah.

Since many people who get involved in these projects are gamers, my bet was this was going that way. I just can imagine some sort of Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos but in a realistic world...

I got that feeling after downloading some scifi add ons...

But now that I know it's educational there is no problem.

I was wondering... I noticed that Cassini has some sort of trajectory around Saturn, but in the far future, it keeps orbiting but Saturn is not there anymore. Are the add ons buggy?

I also noticed that Viking looks fine, but the surrounding just doesn't. may I suggest some sort of loading of local terrain, so it doesn't look as it looks now?

Still, the arrows aiming at off screen objects could be useful when you want to take a screenshot of 2 objects. Also, the nav bouy would be useful when you want to show people where you are. For example: "kids, this is Saturn, we are looking it between the orbits of X and Y moons, we are going to drop a bouy and see where we were from a panoramic view.

Also, the chance to change orientation of objects could allow you to make better screenies.

It may not be a game, but as I like to take screenies, I still ask for some features aiming at the pleasure of watching. However, I don't know if it fits the aims of this software.

You already can change the orientation of objects. Select the object, go into edit mode (@ = shift-2), hold down Ctrl-Shift and the left mouse button, and move the mouse. Unfortunately, the right-mouse button only works for DSC objects and not for SSC objects.

It's by far not only for educational purposes, but I am afraid none of Celestia's other purposes is going to meet your interests:

a) It's meanwhile a neat and most useful tool for (amateur) astronomers, since Celestia's astro-mechanics engine and it's data base has professional standards of accuracy. So people with telescopes (like myself) have plenty of good use for Celestia.

Just as an example: /mutual/ eclipses of the /moons/ of Jupiter are reproduced accurately within 1 second of time! Given their smallness, it is easy to imagine, how accurate the code has to be in order to correctly make some small moon's shadow cone hit another tiny moon at all...and all that precisely at the right time . Each planetary orbit invokes hundreds of correction terms in the code that take into account the subtle gravitational disturbance effects due to all other bodies in our solar system. Etc...

b) Celestia is just good for a lot of pleasure for many people who want to simply "get lost in space" WITHOUT SHOOTING

c) Celestia is a tool that inspires the creativity of many graphical artists! One may suspend about anything about anywhere in Celestia and display it in phantastic 3d graphics. People are designing black holes, phantasy worlds and amazing spacecraft...just to name a few popular applications of Celestia.

Evil Dr Ganymede wrote:...I think that splitting Nebulae from Galaxies has been mentioned before, but nothing's come of it yet.

Incorrect...or uninformed (no adrenaline involved here )

No, I was quite correct. By "nothing's come of it yet" I meant that it hadn't shown up in any official prereleases of Celestia. When I go to the View Options menu in 1.4.0pre6 all I see is the ability to toggle Galaxies, not Galaxies and Nebulae separately. It's inaccurate to suggest that that it has already been implemented in the officially released executables when it hasn't.

And I'm quite aware of all your galaxies work. But still, the fact remains that it's stuff you're working on at the moment and it's not in the executables yet.

NOTE the fact that the requested subdivision into various deepsky object types is in the 1.40pre code since quite a long time.

That's irrelevant to the end user. Right now, you can't split galaxies from nebulae in the officially released versions of Celestia 1.4.0. Until that happens, it hasn't been implemented and it's incorrect to suggest that it has.

Once more, you repeated what I said above in slightly different wording. Is this now MORE USEFUL?

TERRIER wrote:I don't know if you've currently saved any bookmarks ?, but I can say that all mine have been saved in both location and time.

Ok, I was being a bit unclear there, sorry. What I meant was that the bookmark doesn't take you to the same location regardless of the CURRENT time. If I save a bookmark 30,000 km from Io and looking straight at it, it saves the time the bookmark was made. But if I looked at it tomorrow, the bookmark would still take me back to the view I made today, at the time i made the bookmark.

What I think would be more useful would be to take the viewer to the same view but at the current time. So I'd go back to being 30,000 km from Io and looking at it but at the time that I said "go to the bookmark" instead of the time that I made the bookmark.

Evil Dr Ganymede wrote:...I think that splitting Nebulae from Galaxies has been mentioned before, but nothing's come of it yet.

Incorrect...or uninformed (no adrenaline involved here )

No, I was quite correct. By "nothing's come of it yet" I meant that it hadn't shown up in any official prereleases of Celestia. When I go to the View Options menu in 1.4.0pre6 all I see is the ability to toggle Galaxies, not Galaxies and Nebulae separately. You're misleading people by suggesting that it has already been implemented in the officially released executables when it hasn't.

NOTE the fact that the requested subdivision into various deepsky object types is in the 1.40pre code since quite a long time.

That's irrelevant to the end user. Right now, you can't split galaxies from nebulae in the officially released versions of Celestia 1.4.0. Until that happens, it hasn't been implemented and it's incorrect to suggest that it has.

Once more, you repeated what I said above in slightly different wording. Is this now MORE USEFUL?

Given that what you said here was misleading, yes it was.

It's your problem that you are unwilling to compile the code for yourself. Many people have learned meanwhile how to do it in /various/ OS'es, including Windows.
There are detailed instructions in this forum that are continuously being updated.

Building from source code is completely natural in Linux. The new galaxy patches are even being distributed for the MAC OS. The MAC community has become /very/ lively in this forum.

You should also remember that Celestia is being distributed as Open Source software under the GPL licence: This implies --whether you like it or not-- that Celestia is /defined/ ONLY through its SOURCE code and not via a binary compile of it. All the changes I was referring to are existing in the official source code that is available for download for everyone at any time!

Your perspective is inappropriately focussed entirely on the Windows release. Since Chris was decoupled for a long time from development and thus from releasing new Windows versions, the latter is close to 1 year behind!

All the features I mentioned are perfectly incorporated in the 1.40pre LINUX versions and also in the 1.40pre MAC OS version. For these OS's there was quite a bit of activity, recently.

So again, you just demonstrate a restricted perspective and are not much aware of what is going on besides your narrow cone of interest.

And last not least: by your hard-to-understand "end-consumer" attitude you are explicitly ignoring the hard work of various people in this community, who try by all means to push Celestia development ahead and get something done, despite Chris' well-known distraction to other activities!

t00fri wrote:...I have just finished coding some new HSV-coloration algorithm in galaxy.cpp, about which I am going to report very soon. The results are quite beautiful and realistic, indeed... ...Chris got also hooked on it since 1-2 weeks. We are regularly exchanging respective mails, and he promised me to finish his new shader code for elliptical galaxies any time NOW....

I just come over this thread...

Good news!! I was wondering what was going on with this work as your last post in the concerned thread is from the 3 june...

t00fri wrote:It's your problem that you are unwilling to compile the code for yourself. Many people have learned meanwhile how to do it in /various/ OS'es, including Windows.There are detailed instructions in this forum that are continuously being updated.

As usual, you refuse to admit that you're wrong.

This is nonsense, and you know it. Not everyone has the time or inclination to learn coding and learn how to complie programs. You're supposedly smart, you should know this (well, since you insult my intelligence all the time by sneering at my credentials, I'll gladly insult yours).

Building from source code is completely natural in Linux. The new galaxy patches are even being distributed for the MAC OS. The MAC community has become /very/ lively in this forum.

So? This is irrelevant.

Your perspective is inappropriately focussed entirely on the Windows release. Since Chris was decoupled for a long time from development and thus from releasing new Windows versions, the latter is close to 1 year behind!

Sorry, I guess I shouldn't be focussing on the most popular OS on the planet, because you're evidently one of those annoying, stuck-up gits who sneer at anyone who uses it.

All the features I mentioned are perfectly incorporated in the 1.40pre LINUX versions and also in the 1.40pre MAC OS version. For these OS's there was quite a bit of activity, recently.

And this would be no use to anyone who doesn't use Linux or Macs. So it's irrelevant to most of the userbase.

So again, you just demonstrate a restricted perspective and are not much aware of what is going on besides your narrow cone of interest.

"Restricted"? It's fecking WINDOWS we're talking about here!

And last not least: by your hard-to-understand "end-consumer" attitude you are explicitly ignoring the hard work of various people in this community, who try by all means to push Celestia development ahead and get something done, despite Chris' well-known distraction to other activities!

You really are taking the piss now.

Most of the people asking questions here ARE end-consumer. Only a small minority of the people who use Celestia do anything to the code or know anything about it.